Pragmatics - Volume 15, Issue 4, 2005

The study compared the spontaneous use of verbal comments on socio-moral behavior in 20 Estonian and 22 Swedish kindergarten peer dyads during free play situations. All comments on Moral and Social- conventional rules were coded according to Piotrowski’s (1997) model, as well as according to outcomes (agreement, rejection, negotiation or silence). We found that Swedish children were more active in making socio-moral comments than the Estonian children, by commenting more on rules of Rights, Harm to others and Miscellaneous conventional rules. Both the Estonian and the Swedish children made more comments referring to social-conventional than to moral rules. As to outcomes, agreement was the most frequent type in the Swedish data, whereas silence dominated in the Estonian group. Also, the Estonian children rejected both moral and social-conventional rules more often than the Swedish children. Previous research in family dinner conversations in Estonia and Sweden has suggested a more egalitarian interaction pattern in the Swedish homes as well as daycare institutions and schools than in the Estonian equivalents (De Geer et al. 2002; Tulviste et al. 2002). A high amount of comments on socio-moral behavior, particularly comments on rights and harm to others, can be claimed to a further support for this claim.

This paper examines the development of a variety of evidential lexical items in Modern Greek from a longitudinal perspective involving 4;6 – 11;7 year olds. The main question to be addressed concerns parallel or asynchronous order of acquisition: Does the ability to use evidentials emerge for all items under investigation synchronically or does such an ability emerge earlier on for certain items while later for others? If the latter holds, how can this developmental lag be explained? An answer to these questions will draw on the pragmatic-cognitive abilities engaged by different types of evidential markers, and in particular, on the complexity of metarepresentations (Sperber 1994; Wilson 2000, 2005) different evidential markers rely on in order to be used by young children.

This study investigates the cross-linguistic devices of requests written by native English-speaking (NSE) and native Cantonese-speaking (NCS) respondents in an academic context on the basis of 197 discourse completion tests. Both groups asked in a direct sequence accompanied by a different proportion of syntactic and lexical devices to reduce directness. NES used a higher frequency and a wider range of syntactic downgraders than NCS. NCS, however, used a higher frequency of lexical downgraders and a greater number of combinations of lexical devices than NES.<<

The Japanese language is known for its sentence-final particles (SFPs hereafter) that express modality. Although modality would seem to be inseparable from context, only a limited number of studies have explicated the nature of SFPs based on data from conversations. This paper discusses the functions of SFP kana, based on 272 occurrences of the particle from over 7 hours of recorded conversation. I propose that kana, which is commonly defined as a doubt marker, frequently functions as a mitigation marker. My investigation also explores how speakers use this function beyond the sentence level. It suggests that traditional descriptions of the syntactic environments in which SFPs occur are not always substantiated by how kana is actually used. Yet, seemingly unsystematic uses of kana are quite systematic in terms of its semantic and pragmatic aspects. These findings suggest that in studying Japanese sentence-final particles, it’s important to study naturally occurring conversations.

In this article, we explore the presentation and contestation of discourses of womanhood in verbal art performance. In Tuscan-Italian Contrasto verbal duels the artists, both males and females, may impersonate female characters as they exchange insults between each other. In doing so, they deploy multiple discourses of womanhood to demonstrate their wit and verbal artistry. As a consequence, they often subvert and contest “appropriate” female behavior as well as ideas of morality, which might be connected to those behaviors. This highlights the manipulability of discourses of womanhood to obtain particular goals. We analyze Contrasti performances where characters of mother-in-law and daughter-in- law are impersonated. We further argue that the contraposition of different discourses on stage increases the fluidity of gender as a category. In this sense poetic performances are revealed as a loci where perceptions of established gender roles and the connected moral order might be negotiated or destabilized.